What is sustainable floristry?

As the School of Sustainable Floristry, we often get asked “what is sustainable floristry?” and then more often than not, it’s followed with a doubtful question of “well, that’s not viable, is it?”  

So we wanted to address those questions head on, over two articles, with a view to increasing a broader level of understanding about sustainability within the floristry sector, and to inspire change and a sense of empowerment - among florists, among customers and maybe somewhere along the line among policy and industry makers. 

So this is article one: What is sustainable floristry?

1. It’s the economy flowers, stupid. 

(At risk of breaking all rules of business comms 101 about potentially insulting your customer…) It feels right to start by co-opting the famous phrase scrawled in the White House by Clinton’s 1992 election strategist to draw everyone’s attention back to the overlooked but fundamental point. 

Sustainable floristry - and floristry in general - is all about the flowers. Not just what they’re wrapped in or arranged in, but the product that sits at the very heart of our industry. And it is a serious industry, worth £1.4 billion in the UK and USD33.3 billion globally. 

Only when we use the word ‘industry’ it somehow separates us from remembering that flowers are a crop that are farmed. 

And that there is the crux of sustainable floristry: For our industry to be sustainable, we need to address the flowers—and with them, the farming system that underpins the whole industry. 

Intensive flower farming, like intensive food farming, causes myriad environmental and social issues

Echoing what has happened in food farming, the vast majority of flowers in the floristry industry are intensively farmed at scale.

This type of farming:

• Is dominated by monocrops, which significantly reduces biodiversity and causes ecosystem colllapse.

• Is so intensive on the soil, it has to rely heavily on fertiliser and pesticides to maintain yields, and reduces the soils ability to retain water, resulting an increase in the need for irrigation and an increase in flood risk.

• Takes place in countries on the other side of the world where temperatures remain high enough for flowers to grow all year round AND where workers are cheaper and standards of employment and health and safety are less regulated. 

• The BBC recently published a report exploring the working conditions of employees at a rose farm in Kenya. It is true that Fairtrade flowers exist in the market, and this is a great thing. But to contextualise things, according to Fairtrade, there are approximately 73,000 farmers involved in growing, harvesting, packing and caring for Fairtrade flowers across the world. The total number of people ‘formally employed’ within the cut flower sector in Kenya alone is 150,000.

Flowers being dipped in silver nitrate, image shared on @greenwashtheflowers, source unknown

Globalized supply routes present further challenges

86% of flowers in the UK are imported, via the Dutch auctions, with a large proportion coming from as far afield as Kenya and Ecuador.

In addition to questions around farming practices, for flowers to survive such long journeys, the flowers are:

• specifically bred and grown to be ramrod straight so they can easily be packed and shipped.

• reliant on lengthy and energy intensive cold-chain infrastructure to retain their ‘freshness’.

• dipped in silver nitrate, a hazardous bio pesticide, to inhibit the production of ethylene (which promotes ageing and ripening).

• A 2017 study showed that pesticide residues were found in the urine of florists working in Belgium, and in France, the French Fund for Pesticide Victims has just confirmed the cause of death from leukemia of the daughter of a florist to be a direct result of her prenatal exposure to pesticides. 

The product at the heart of the floristry industry, the very thing that is meant to symbolise a celebration of nature, is, ironically, doing the very opposite.

So what do sustainable flowers look like? 

For flowers to be sustainable, they need to be farmed sustainably. Wicked Leeks’ explanation of agroecological, regenerative and organic farming approaches is a helpful starting point for understanding more about sustainable farming practices. But, in summary, it is about farming that works ‘with nature’ to grow high quality crops in balance with the ecosystem that exists between plants, animals, people and their environment. 

Lucy cutting flowers on site at Howbury Farm Flowers, the home to the School of Sustainable Floristry

The agroecological farming movement has grown rapidly in recent years, and is being shown to have positive results on both the environment and production. Farming in this way has a positive effect on soil health, biodiversity, water retention, reduction in the use of chemicals and, according to the Woodland Trust, the 3% of farmland that currently practises agroecology in the UK has found a 20% increase in yield (hat tip to Anna’s Flower Farm for this data point).

Within the cut flower industry, flower farmers growing agroecologically already exist and are supplying florists and customers across the country. Flowers from the Farm is a trade association for UK cut flower farmers, with approximately 1,000 members. Most of these farms are small, but their numbers and scale are growing. Furthermore, larger traditionally food focused farmers are starting to explore the introduction of flower farms on their land as a way to diversify and support the biodiversity and pollinators essential for their existing crops. At this year’s Groundswell (the leading conference on regenerative farming in the UK) one of the most well attended break-out groups was focused on incorporating flower farms into existing farms.

At present the proportion of flowers grown in this way represents a fraction of the flower supply in the industry. It’s true. But the point is, they exist. And they are proof that flowers farmed in this way can exist within a sustainable floristry industry. 

(And I can feel you thinking, “well, that’s not viable for a £1.4bn industry, is it?” But you’ll have to wait for ‘part two’ to delve into that…)

2. It’s more than just no floral foam, sustainable mechanics and the reduction of plastics

Probably the most commonly discussed area of sustainable floristry is the use of floral foam. Florists and organisations around the world, including the RHS, have embraced the no floral foam movement and it has become, in ways, synonymous with the sustainable floristry movement. 

Piles of floral foam, source Sustainable Floristry Network

The Sustainable Floristry Network has written a very detailed and excellent explanation of floral foam and its challenges, which we encourage you to read. But in a nutshell, floral foam, otherwise known as Oasis, after the company that makes it, is a single use plastic ‘foam’ product designed to hold water and allow floral arrangements to remain hydrated and stable without spillage. The problem is, that as a plastic, it does not biodegrade. Instead, after use, it enters the natural environment (when crumbled down the sink, mixed with green waste or buried on top of a coffin) where it fragments into smaller and smaller pieces, known as micro plastics. These micro plastics have been found to have a toxic effect on aquatic animals. 

The recently published guide on reducing plastics, packaging and waste in the industry, produced by the Sustainable Flower Research Project out of Coventry University is also a very helpful and practical resource. 

Major change often begins by engaging people with smaller, ‘manageable’ changes. And the level of environmental awareness and change that has come about as a result of the no floral foam movement is inspiring. Feeling good about change that is tangible and manageable is so important in encouraging action in an area where individuals often feel overwhelmed and powerless. 

But if we only address the plastic that flowers are arranged into or wrapped in, then that’s all it is: a surface level solution to a far bigger issue. Discussing the merits of having 90% recycled plastic in the wraps around the bouquets that one distributor supplies to supermarkets across the country, seems to overlook the environmental impact of growing the 700 million and 3.5 billion stems for the UK and European markets respectively that this plastic is wrapping *.

Sustainable floral mechanics shouldn’t be used to dominate the sustainable floristry agenda at the expense of other, more systemic, impactful—and yes, commercially challenging—changes.

On a slight tangent, floral foam is an interesting example of the theory of unintended consequences. The ramrod straight flowers that have became ubiquitous in floristry (see explanation above), do not naturally ‘spill’ over the edge of floral arrangements, and floral foam was, in part, invented to enable flowers to be inserted and hydrated ‘upside down’ to overcome this design challenge. And ultimately resulted in a significant environmental problem which didn’t exist before the globalization and industrialization of flower supply... 

Alternative ‘sustainable’ products have started to enter the industry, some with more dubious eco credentials than others (again, we encourage you to read the Sustainable Floristry Network’s excellent guide on these). But ultimately, all of these alternatives are still ‘single use’ products. And what will the unintended consequences of their widespread adoption be?

The most sustainable floristry mechanic is, quite simply, water, and designing in a way that the flowers themselves can handle. 

3. Season led floral design—Flor-art-istry

Which leads us on to the third key area of sustainable floristry. The floristry itself. 

You would be forgiven for thinking that floristry is all about the flowers. But in this modern industrial day and age, it has become all about efficiencies, scale and lowest cost models, with fragmented, lengthy globalized supply chains, ‘specialisation’ and ‘intensification’ of the means of production (ie the farming) and a deskilling of the labour force. All of which has severed the relationship between the florist and the flowers. And in turn between the customer and the flowers. 29% of people buy their flowers in Tesco.

Cissy with a bridal bouquet, made using the cream of the September crop.

We have written about this in detail before, but for floristry to become more sustainable, we need to restore the relationship between floristry, flowers and the seasons. As has been seen among chefs in the food sector, instead of writing ‘recipes’ that can be made all year round with ingredients flown in out of season, we need to reclaim the artistry and connection to nature and the seasons that has been lost in floristry.

Florists need to cultivate a deep knowledge and understanding of their materials, they need to develop an understanding of how to design depending on the season and the flowers, and they need to share this knowledge confidently with their customers, helping to educate them about the choices they make. Reframing what we can expect from our flowers at different times of the year is a key part of this.

Again, I can hear the skeptical “but that’s not viable is it?”We have discussed this at length before, and we will again in ‘part two’, but ‘traditional’ floristry is in decline (it is the 6th most in decline business on the high street). In contrast, season led floristry—or flor-art-istry—is on the rise, led by a new generation of florists, who want to work in a different, and better, way. Indeed, many of the top floral designers in the country are season led florists.

Season led floristry is flor-art-istry led by the flowers as they are presented to us in each different season and evokes the natural landscape, connecting us as florists, and in turn our customers, to nature. Full of vitality and shaped by the climate in which they grow, their stems often incorporate the movement of the wind as they grew, and their colour can vary with the intensity of the sun or the volume of rain. They change day by day with the seasons and no two seasons are the same from one year to the next. This means that they truly connect the floral arrangements to the time and the place in which they are made.

Given the proven health and psychological benefits of flowers in our increasingly ‘disconnected’ world, encouraging this kind of floristry has myriad benefits beyond the aesthetic.

Conclusion

The subjects touched on here are huge, and complex. Simplifying complex issues is important for distilling key messages and spreading awareness. But it is a fine balance not to ‘over simplify’ and we have tried to tread that line carefully. Clearly we could write an entire book (or three) on the subject, and we encourage you to read more widely and deeply on the subjects discussed here.

We see sustainable floristry as an industry founded on sustainable and more equitable farming practices, sustainable mechanics, season led design and a reframing of what floristry actually is. And the exciting thing is, sustainable floristry is a movement already taking place at the grass roots level of the industry. Instead of following the traditional model, with all its environmental and social issues, and its declining business model, sustainable florists are turning away from the status quo and turning towards an active and growing demographic of customers who share their values. These florists are building flourishing new businesses, and sowing the seeds of a new industrial model. 

Sustainable floristry is the future of floristry. And it is bright. Join the flor-art-istry rebellion. 

* Statistic given at a recent conference on plastics, packaging and waste in the floristry industry at Coventry Cathedral.